ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

Comedy Central’s “South Park” has irked an array of individuals and groups since its debut in the late 1990s. The animated series about the adventures of a group of youngsters in a quiet mountain town in Colorado, though critically acclaimed, has drawn sharp rebukes from this country’s social conservatives on numerous occasions. (For instance, the cartoon has mocked televangelist Pat Robertson and recently portrayed the Catholic League President Bill Donahue as a conniving rogue in an episode dealing loosely with the celebration of Easter.) The rumblings, however, have become relatively inaudible here.

But some prosecutors in Russia, under pressure from the Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith, are seeking a court order to ban its airing on a channel called 2x2. The prosecutors argue that the channel, when it aired the South Park episode, “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classic,” ran afoul of the nation’s law that prohibits the airing of extremism, reports Reuters. According to the news service, the Russian law defines extremism as to include “the abasement of national dignity” and “inciting religious and national hatred.” The head of the Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith tagged South Park as being “just one of many cartoons that need to be banned from open broadcast … as it insults the feelings of religious believers and incites religious and national hatred.”

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, responded by saying they were “equal opportunity offenders.”